Email Deliverability: What You Must Do To Control It

An email deliverability strategy is undoubtedly an important element of getting the best out of your email marketing effort. You need to be able to control this in the short and long term.

However, setting yourself up for success with email deliverability requires understanding some factors before, and after pressing the “send” button.

These two sides constitute the two major parts of an email marketing strategy. To learn about these two elements, please read this article to the end.

Controlling Your Email Deliverability

What you should do before sending the email

Before you hit the send button, it’s highly recommendable to do three things as follows:

1. Getting Consent for Your Email Deliverability

First off, you need to secure consent for your enterprise. When it comes to email marketing. Consent refers to getting verifiable permission from the target recipient of your email.

In other words, the email recipient needs to act to confirm that they want to receive your email. For instance, they may fill out a form and give their consent by tapping a checkbox.

Collecting verifiable permissions from contacts helps create a solid foundation for your email deliverability strategy. By so doing, it will be less challenging to develop everlasting business relationships with your contacts.

Remember:

Getting a contact’s permission becomes even more important when you buy a list.

You do not have permission to send them emails unless given.

It’s important to remember that you can only buy the contact list; you do not buy the consent.

If you desire to build trust with your clients or buyers, buying a list is not recommendable. Do not do it.

On the contrary, you should collect consent from those who give your business their contacts freely. For instance, you can ask your website guests to fill out a form to obtain their consent.

2. Setting up contact lists for Email Deliverability

When it comes to creating a contact list, three important elements to have in mind are sources, permissions, and expectations.

First Element

Firstly, try to consider how the individuals got onto your contact list. What did they do to get onto your contact list? Was it through your pillage pages or blog?

Some individuals who have been in your CRM for some time without engagement can even make it to your contact list. By considering the source of your contacts, you can determine whether to send an email to the contact or not.

Failure to determine the contact’s source might indicate a lack of permission.

Second Element

Speaking of permission, the second element, you need to consider is. If there is anyone in your company that can get permission from the contacts. Sometimes, it can also be you.

Then the type of permission given by the contact must also be considered. For instance, were you permitted to send a marketing email to the contact? 

As suggested earlier, permission helps develop trust as people will see you as an honest individual.

Besides, permission and consent are elements of being compliant under the General Data Protection Regulation. More than that, it helps develop trust that comes with permission to process and exchange the information of your clients.

Consider

Consider the where and how you get permission. Also, take into consideration whether they want to receive the type of emails that you are sending.

These options can be made available in your contact form or show them the preferences link as part of your email’s footer. In this way, they can update their email preference whenever they want.

The manner that you request permission and how the permissions are being logged will continuously help build trust and get permission to send emails to your contact.

When Purchasing A Contact List

Purchasing a contact list is not the smartest move.

The reason is that you are not the only one buying the list. Hence, your business emails are more likely categorized together with other people who bought a list and dumped it into the junk folder.

Remember

Always remember that email marketing is a long term strategy. By building a false foundation from the start, you’ll only put the reputation of your business at risk.

Before sending an email, how do you feel about the source of your list? Let’s assume that one of your contacts complained about you spamming him, will you feel confident to tell them how you got their details?

Will you be able to say “It’s me; you gave your consent to receive this email.” However, if you have verifiable consent, you will be at ease and be able to prove it.

More importantly, it will save you from violating the terms and conditions of your email service provider. So, if you don’t feel confident about your contact source, you might want to reconsider sending the email.

If your contacts were collected from a reputable source, you can then proceed to ask for permission.

Final Part of Setting Up

The final part of setting up your contact list is expectations. What type of information are your contacts expecting from you?

How frequently do they want to receive your emails?

Does your contact list expect emails from your business?

Did you expressly state the type of content that your contacts will be receiving, to your contacts while collecting their permissions?

Did you remind them about yourself, your business, and why they are receiving a message from you?

You might also want to remind them about when they accepted to receive emails from you.

When it comes to finding out why your email marketing is not performing, you can’t leave any stone unturned. Ensure that you hold your business and email to a high standard.

Insert Yourself

Put yourself in the position of your email recipient and try to feel how confused you will be when you don’t know why you are getting a particular set of emails.

While analyzing the email performance metrics, you will realize that a poorly performing email might be due to the fact your content doesn’t match what your contact list signed up for at the beginning or it is not what they are expecting from you.

Thus, considering expectations from the beginning always come in handy for successful email marketing.

When you know the expecting value and frequency of your contacts, it will be easy to build trust and offer value.

Ensure that your content matches the expectations of your email recipients. In this way, you’ll be providing value to them.

For More Clarity:

Read about the story of Natera. The popular brand is known for providing health tips for people during pregnancy.

However, over time, Natera realized that the open and click-through rates of their email are getting really bad. As a result, the brand assessed the possible problem.

Afterward, Natera decided to start helping their email recipients get the healthiest pregnancy possible. The brand noticed a small issue, which later turned out to be a great solution.

 Natera’s First Step

Due to the small problem, the company had to adopt a new marketing strategy that includes a multi-step process.

The new approach entails the brand changing how they send their emails, starting from segmentation and source – and not their entire database. 

Natera’s Second Step

Also, Natera stopped sending emails to those who are no longer interested in their emails.

In other words, they noted their contacts’ permissions and respected the wishes of those who no longer need their emails.

Natera’s Third Step

Additionally, Natera altered the language of their email’s content to meet the expectations of their contact lists.

Alongside a language change, the brand also considered their email’s frequency. Furthermore, the email marketing team of Natera improved their content by focusing on values that can help build trust with their email recipients.

Natera’s Last Step

The last step was educating their internal teams on how to continue implementing a customer-focused strategy.

After regaining their customers’ inbox and trust, Natera noted, “The goal is to build trust with customers and provide them with useful information they couldn’t get anywhere else. The development of highly personalized nurture campaigns will help us serve you helpful, relevant content based on where the customer is in their personal journey.”

3. Analyzing email engagement for Email Deliverability

Here is the final step to take before you click on the send button. As suggested many times already, trust is key towards building a relationship with your contacts.

While assessing the performance of your emails. It is imperative to check how your contacts engage with your business emails.

In reality, it’s about how much trust they have for your business and the respect you have earned from them.

Part of your email engagement analysis should include post-send metrics of the previously sent emails, which include engagement, opens, and click-through. Endeavor to check the trends of each metric.

What you should do after sending the email

Once you have sent the emails to your contact list. It is time to initiate the second phase of your email deliverability strategy.

At this stage, it’s important to monitor the signals coming from your contacts. Check for any event that occurred after sending the emails and learn from it.

As far as engagement is concerned, two possible events are likely to occur as follows:

  • Positive engagements: In this case, you have to monitor your opens, clicks, and any conversations that ensued. Check whether people are replying to your emails or not. Are your email recipients opening your email? Are they tapping the CTA in your email?
  • Negative engagements: This case involves taking note of the contacts who bounce your emails. Also, some contacts might churn your message.

Positive Engagement

If your email engagement is positive, you will notice how your email is creating a relationship between your business and your email recipient.

The metrics involved in positive engagements will show you how your email is sparking people’s interest in your business and how they are taking action on your email.

Positive engagements are always the end products of an email sent to those who gave their verifiable permission and people who you know exactly what they are expecting from you. A positive engagement is the dream of every email marketing team.

The metrics and trends associated with positive engagement provide key information on how well you are engaging with your contacts and what you should continue to do to keep them engaged with your business.

Negative Engagement

When you experience negative engagement, you still have to monitor some metrics and trends for future success.

Negative engagement tells you a lot about your contacts and how you can enhance your email deliverability strategy.

As briefly stated earlier, you have to check contacts who unsubscribe or churn your emails.

Also, it is pertinent to note down those who are no longer interested in your emails or your services. After noting down all these metrics, try to find out a common attribute among them.

Check whether they are from the same source or their expectations. Consider the opt-in for each contact and see any similarity between them.

At this stage, you are taking some information from your before-send strategy and applying them to your after-send.

Information that comes in handy at this stage includes sources, permissions, and expectations.

By applying these three elements, you can determine the aspects of your strategy that requires more work and those to give higher priority. It all depends on the trend that you see.

Common Attribute

Let’s take a look at how you can find a common attribute between metrics and the way forward from your findings.

Firstly, consider the entire contact list that receives your email and define their specific sources.

In other words, find where you get each contact from – are they from a form submission, imported list from a website, or through a tradeshow?

The objective is to determine whether the source of your contacts led to negative engagements. By checking your contact’s source, you will be able to confirm the form of opt-in consent received from each contact.

Opt-in exists in three forms:

  • Opt-in: An individual that chose opt-in means that they give you express permission to message them and process their data. If you want, you can apply an extra opt-in layer to confirm their opt-in action. Simply include extra confirmation to ensure that the verifiable permission isn’t a mistake on the part of your contact.
  • Opt-out: As for opt-out, this is the complete opposite of opt-in. The contact simply does not want to receive emails from your brand.
  • Neutral: The neutral status is a case in which a contact chooses not to confirm or reject a chance to opt-in for your email.

A sincere answer to these questions will help understand the poor performance of your email to a considerable extent.

If you are not too sure whether they opt-in or not, the best practice is to confirm their permission before sending the email.

While getting their permission, you can also try to find out what they are expecting to receive from your business. This will help you send your contacts targeted and useful content.

When your contacts receive an email containing an expected message. You will be providing value to them. As a result, a relationship will start growing between them and your business.

Also, an important area to note is that if your contacts sign up for a blog update monthly. Don’t start sending them emails every week.

They don’t expect to read your blog update every week nor daily. Failure to do as they expect can jeopardize your relationship with them.

Conclusion

Before wrapping up, it is worth restating that expectation forms a crucial aspect of controlling your email deliverability success.

If you can harness the power of expectation significantly, you can easily use email marketing to grow your business. Also, bear in mind that negative engagement is not a loss.

In fact, it is your ticket towards having a successful email marketing campaign.

As explained earlier, simply determine the sources of your contacts. Then check whether you have verifiable permission to send them emails. Are they expecting your emails in their inbox?

Understanding all these important details will help re-strategize and nail your email marketing effort on the head.

Use these tips and recommendations of controlling email deliverability strategy herein and start giving values and building relationships with your contacts.